Krauthammer: White House ‘lied’ on Libya because they had ‘the media in their pocket’

On Friday night’s broadcast of “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, host Sean Hannity asked Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer why the White House waited so long to acknowledge that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi was a pre-planned terrorist strike.

According to Krauthammer, the Obama administration delayed announcing the news primarily to protect the president’s image on foreign policy.

“They had two reasons to lie,” Krauthammer said. “The first reason was the fact that the Sept. 11 attack occurred a week after they just spent four days in Charlotte dancing on the grave of bin Laden. Remember, this is their single foreign policy achievement. There is none other. Look at Iran Look at Russia. Look at Israel. Look at Syria. Look at the Arab spring. It’s all in collapse. They got one thing to argue, and they sure argued it, where they made the point again and again and again with that ridiculous slogan from Vice President [Biden], ‘bin laden dead, GM alive,’ because what Libya said, what it was proclaiming to the world and the reason the attack was launched in the first place was to say, ‘bin Laden dead, al-Qaida alive.’ That is what has happened as a result of leading from behind in Libya.”

Krauthammer said the problems stemming from the president’s foreign policy extend beyond Libya.

“You’ve got, you know, al-Qaida has — essentially one of the jihadist factions taken over northern Mali,” Krauthammer said. “There are training camps throughout North Africa. And we now know about the rise of the strength of the jihadist in Syria, where Obama has again has been leading from behind.”

Krauthammer, who is also a regular on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” and the weekend syndicated show “Inside Washington,”added that, in those shows, he had been pressed to explain why the White House would think it could get away with its apparent deception.

“The second thing is, and I heard from this from liberal colleagues on some of the other shows I’ve done, is, ‘Well, how could they have done this? Why would they be lying? Wouldn’t they know it would come out?’” Krauthammer said. “And the answer is no. They saw what the mainstream media did right after the attack. And you know what they did — they spent three days attacking Mitt Romney for a statement he issued the next day, in which he denounced what the Cairo embassy released, the apologetic statement that was made.”

“So the media went ahead and spent three days ignoring the attack, ignoring the implications and concentrating always on that,” he continued. “So they think they got the media in their pocket. The election is coming up. They simply have to run out the clock, and they’ll be scot-free. They’ll be home free. And that is what they thought. However, it was you and others and Bret Baier and Fox which kept the story alive, because we kept finding out what really happened. And now the mainstream media had been shamed to covering it themselves.”